See, according to the Times, the United Nations is responsible for bringing cholera to Haiti. The resulting epidemic, which has been proven to have originated near a UN peacekeeping base in the country, led to the death of at least 10,000 Haitians. And although the affair was noteworthy enough for Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to accept responsibility for it, it wasn’t enough for anybody at the UN to go to trial for it.
So disastrous was the United Nation’s mission in Haiti that a special report looking into it was sent to Secretary Ban. After examining the outbreak and it’s aftermath for himself, special rapporteur Philip Alston concluded that it never would have happened had it not been for “the actions of the United Nations”:
“The first victims lived near a base housing 454 United Nations peacekeepers freshly arrived from Nepal, where a cholera outbreak was underway, and waste from the base often leaked into the river. Numerous scientists have since argued that the base was the only plausible source of the outbreak — whose real death toll, one study found, could be much higher than the official numbers state — but United Nations officials have consistently insisted that its origins remain up for debate.
Mr. Alston wrote that the United Nations’ Haiti cholera policy ‘is morally unconscionable, legally indefensible and politically self-defeating.’ He added, ‘It is also entirely unnecessary.’ The organization’s continuing denial and refusal to make reparations to the victims, he argued, ‘upholds a double standard according to which the U.N. insists that member states respect human rights, while rejecting any such responsibility for itself.’
He said, ‘It provides highly combustible fuel for those who claim that U.N. peacekeeping operations trample on the rights of those being protected, and it undermines both the U.N.’s overall credibility and the integrity of the Office of the Secretary-General.’
Mr. Alston went beyond criticizing the Department of Peacekeeping Operations to blame the entire United Nations system. ‘As the magnitude of the disaster became known, key international officials carefully avoided acknowledging that the outbreak had resulted from discharges from the camp,’ he noted.
His most severe criticism was reserved for the organization’s Office of Legal Affairs, whose advice, he wrote, ‘has been permitted to override all of the other considerations that militate so powerfully in favor of seeking a constructive and just solution.’ Its interpretations, he said, have ‘trumped the rule of law.’
Mr. Alston also argued in his report that, as The New York Times has reported, the United Nations’ cholera eradication program has failed. Infection rates have been rising every year in Haiti since 2014, as the organization struggles to raise the $2.27 billion it says is needed to eradicate the disease from member states. No major water or sanitation projects have been completed in Haiti; two pilot wastewater processing plants built there in the wake of the epidemic quickly closed because of a lack of donor funds.
In a separate internal report released days ago after being withheld for nearly a year, United Nations auditors said a quarter of the sites run by the peacekeepers with the organization’s Stabilization Mission in Haiti, or Minustah, that they had visited were still discharging their waste into public canals as late as 2014, four years after the epidemic began.”
In light of this clear-cut case of organizational negligence, you would think that UN employees and administrators would be in the docket for their offenses. But thanks to a federal appeals court, they will all remain free to hurt impoverished people around the world:
“A United States federal appeals panel has upheld the argument that the United Nations cannot be sued in American courts, dealing a setback in a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of thousands of cholera victims in Haiti.
The ruling by the three-judge panel in New York was released on Thursday, a day after a spokesman for Secretary General Ban Ki-moonacknowledged for the first time that the United Nations played a role in the outbreak, which killed thousands of people.
In the decision for the panel, Judge José A. Cabranes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote that the United Nations did not lose its legal immunity even if it failed to give the plaintiffs a chance to seek a settlement, as required by an international convention.
The decision slammed the door on a day of muted celebration by the plaintiffs and many people in Haiti who had welcomed a statement by Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesman for Mr. Ban, that the United Nations had ‘become convinced that it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak’ of cholera and that officials were considering a ‘significant new set of U.N. actions’ to be presented publicly within two months.
Mr. Haq’s statement was in response to a confidential report sent to Mr. Ban by a United Nations adviser on Aug. 8. The report’s draft language stated that the epidemic ‘would not have broken out before the actions of the United Nations.’
It estimated the potential cost to the United Nations, were it to lose the lawsuit, at $40 billion, five times its annual worldwide peacekeeping budget.”
Source: The New York Times
Photo: defesanet.com
Awful!
UN is corrupt,useless
Those poor people of Haiti! First the Clintons steal their money, now the UN is refusing to help them.